


someday comes back

by restlesslikeme



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Body Horror, Cursed Derry Magic, Deadlights Richie, Horror, M/M, Post canon, Stanley Uris Lives, Undead Eddie, back from the dead, canon typical gore, unfinished work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:54:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22323679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/restlesslikeme/pseuds/restlesslikeme
Summary: He could tell the others. The option hangs over him, and a couple of times he even pulls out his phone, thumbs poised to tap out a cry for help --Hey, anyone else still seeing monsters? Anyone else having trouble sleeping? Anyone else being fucking haunted?
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 3
Kudos: 29





	someday comes back

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS AN UNFINISHED WORK. I'm mostly throwing it out here to get it out of my drafts, where it's been sitting for months by now. I do not have any plans to finish this at this point in time, which means there is no resolution to this. If that isn't something you're interested in reading, that's completely understandable! This is your warning to click back.

For as long as he can remember, Richie has the same dream.

He’s in a car under a clear grey sky. The car itself changes: sometimes it’s a new, shiny thing, something with his custom stereo and with smooth leather seats. Sometimes it’s older, a car he can remember being in the back of sometime during his childhood, with the ugly fake wood steering wheel and the crusty velvet seats.

There’s a boy sitting in his passenger seat, maybe twelve, maybe thirteen years old. Richie doesn’t know his name; he thinks maybe he knew him once, the nagging recognition sitting in the back of his throat like a sore, but he doesn’t anymore. The boy has dark hair and dark eyes and his skin is too pale, and in his dream Richie is afraid of him.

Richie doesn’t drive, because he doesn’t know where he’s going. He doesn’t touch the boy, but something awful and guilty churns in his stomach, and when he turns to look at him, there’s black bubbling up from the boy’s mouth, dripping down his chin and onto his faded t-shirt like blood or like vomit, dripping dripping dripping...

Sometimes Richie asks him a question -- who he is, where he’s going, what he wants. He never gets an answer.

Most of the time he just sits in the driver’s seat of the car, trying to remember the boy’s name. Trying to know him without looking at him; this sick, dead kid with his black lips and his black, judging eyes, staring at Richie as the sky and the road yawns endlessly in front of them until Richie wakes up in a cold sweat.

It’s only years later, when he goes home to Derry that he realizes who he is. 

\--

  
  


He doesn’t tell Eddie about the dream. 

  
  


\--

  
  


They fight, and they win, and Eddie dies anyways.

Neibolt falls away into dust, and Richie screams until his lungs are sore. He screams and he wonders if it’s his fault after all, if Bev wasn’t the only one with visions, although he was never shown any way to stop what was coming. He never saw that final moment, that horrible crescendo, Eddie’s body falling limply aside, the hole in Eddie’s chest gaping underneath his hands. 

He never saw it until it was too late, and he never touched Eddie the way he wanted to, either. 

  
  


\--

  
  


There’s a life he put on hold in California. It’s supposed to be different now that he remembers, now that they’ve killed It and confronted their bullshit and held hands. Mostly Richie finds it’s a lot of the same, except now he has a name for the loneliness that haunts his expensive penthouse. The others call, and they text, and Richie realizes that he’s spent an entire lifetime of practicing how to lie through his teeth. 

  
For the first two months, the only thing in Richie’s dreams is the deadlights. They float in the center of his vision, three perfect balls of cold fire surrounded by darkness, burning away everything else. When he wakes up, his eyes hurt.

“Do you ever have those dreams still? Visions?” Richie’s not sure what time it is; too fucking early, mostly. He’s got his phone tucked in against his shoulder. “Like -- do you ever see us dying still?” 

It’s always Bev he calls when they get to be too much, when he hasn’t slept in a week and his hands are shaking from it. From the distant whirr of cars on the other end of the phone, he knows she’s sitting on her balcony the way he’s sitting on his, and there’s something comforting about that. Like they’re connected, despite the miles between them.

“Not since we finished it,” she answers. Richie gave up smoking years ago, but listening to Bev take a drag across a phone line always makes him itch for one anyways. “I think that ended them.”

Richie doesn’t answer. He takes a gulp of his coffee -- still too hot -- and winces as it scalds his throat. If Bev isn’t dreaming than that means it’s just him; worse, it means that maybe it has nothing to do with the deadlights at all, maybe it’s just his own fucked up brain processing shit the only way he knows how.

He hasn’t told her, either.

“It’s over, Richie,” she says softly, kindly, misunderstanding his silence. Misunderstanding the reason he’s asking in the first place. “We don’t have to worry about it anymore. We beat it. We got out.”

“Well not all of us, right?” Richie counters, more sharply than he means to. More sharply than she deserves, and on the other end Bev falls silent. Still, he pushes it, his thumbnail tapping anxiously against the porcelain of his mug as he stares out over the empty street. “We didn’t all get out.”

“I’m sorry, Rich.”

Suddenly Richie feels like he’s going to cry. He wants to close his eyes against the pressure behind them, but every time he does it seems like the deadlights are there waiting. Instead he takes off his glasses and lets the city below him blur out.

“I gotta go,” he manages, before she can ask him anything else. “I’ve got a rehearsal in a couple hours. I’ll text you later.”

\--

Eddie never even got a funeral. 

Sometimes Richie thinks that’s the worst part of all of it; they left him there, alone in the dark, and that house ate him up as if he had never existed in the first place. In the end he was another strike on Derry’s missing persons record, a phone call to next of kin who wouldn’t lay him to rest without having something to bury, and then nothing at all but a name in a data base. 

They could have carried him, he thinks. They should have dragged him out, in the end, out into the light, out of the cold and the damp and the dark. Even if it had meant he bled out on the sidewalk, at least they would have been with him. At least he wouldn’t have been alone.

And quietly, secretly, as the days stretch into weeks and Richie’s dreams keep taking him back there anyways, another aching thought:

He should have stayed with him.

\--

There’s other things --

Richie wonders if the backstage crew think he’s drunk or high or maybe both. He’s been jittery and generous with his alcohol, so he can’t blame them. It’s not so bad that he can’t go on stage and say a few stupid lines for ninety minutes. Half of the stuff is autopilot at this point. 

There’s a natural pause while he waits for the laughter to settle out. This is one of the big, popular punchlines, the one they promote with all the hashtags and t-shirts. Somehow, it never gets old, and they all lose it every time.

Except for one person.

It’s the stillness that makes him catch Richie’s eye. In a sea of wiggling, guffawing faces, he’s stiff as a board, and Richie’s posture quickly mimics him, his blood running cold. Dark, dead eyes stare out at Richie from the crowd, impossibly still, impossibly there.

Eddie. 

Eddie stares at him, and when he opens his mouth, wide enough to scream, dirt and inky blood cascade out and down his chest to stain his shirt.

“Oh, uh,” Richie says thickly into his mic. “Excuse me one second.” 

He can’t move, his legs seemingly rooted to the floor below him. Instead Richie doubles over and promptly throws up onto the polished surface of the stage, to a mixture of horrified laughter and disgusted cries. When he looks up, Eddie is gone.

But he keeps coming back, intermittently, in different ways. 

Blood on his hands backstage before a show, Eddie’s voice calling to him from the audience. The deadlights themselves are gone, replaced by something much worse. Little visions, little terrors, usually no more than a couple of seconds long before he’s jolted back to reality. 

Sometimes Richie will be driving and he’ll swear he sees Eddie across the street, standing on a corner, staring out into nothing.

Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.

He fumbles two more shows before the management company postpones the rest of his west coast dates. 

\--

The problem with the whole thing -- and Richie would assume that the rest of his friends would have to agree -- is that the very specific cosmic clown related trauma that acts as a cornerstone to the shit he has to unpack isn’t something you can tell a therapist.

No matter how much normal shit he couches it in, there’s no way to untangle some of this specific bullshit from the cistern and what they saw there. No way to pretend that the way Eddie went down was anything more innocuous than what it was, no way to determine whether or not what’s he’s seeing is real or if he’s just genuinely losing his marbles.

He could tell the others. The option hangs over him, and a couple of times he even pulls out his phone, thumbs poised to tap out a cry for help --

_Hey, anyone else still seeing monsters? Anyone else having trouble sleeping? Anyone else being fucking haunted?_

Then he thinks of Ben and Bev, and the pictures they keep sending of the new house they’re renovating together, happy and smiling and so much _lighter_ than they looked in Derry. He thinks about Bill, waist deep in reconciling with his wife, and Stan who suffered so much for them and is just barely getting his life back after nearly a year. 

He thinks about Mike, who dealt with this shit for twenty-fucking-seven years on his own, and Richie can’t bring himself to do it.

\--

Richie opens his eyes and he’s in the driver’s seat again.

“Shit.”

It’s been a while. The deadlights have been suffocating this one out, he thinks, the deadlights and Neibolt, and that fucking Paul Bunyan bullshit. In fact, as familiar as this dream is, Richie can’t remember having it since he left Derry, as if meeting him again as an adult wiped the lost little kid away. He’s been seeing Eddie in different ways, but not like this.

So why is he back now?

“Richie --” an echo of his voice in the cistern, mournful and desperate and ringing in Richie’s ears. “Richie.”

Richie tastes dirt on his tongue, heavy and cloying. His hands grip the steering wheel, and he takes a deep breath, turning his head to look at his passenger.

Eddie looks back at him, forty years old and full of grief. He doesn’t look as badly as he has when Richie’s seen him lately -- he’s pale, and the circles under his eyes are dark, and there’s a bandage covering one cheek. The blood on his mouth looks like its been wiped away, though, and nothing about him rots.

Aside from the pit in his chest, Richie could almost believe he made it out.

“Richie,” Eddie says again, and he sounds scared. His voice wavers. “I want to fucking go _home,_ man _.”_

It’s the first time Eddie’s spoken to him since -- 

He never talks, in Richie’s nightmares. Never talks when Richie sees him in all the places he shouldn’t be. At the very most, he says Richie’s name, but it’s like a recording. A memory on loop in Richie’s brain. He never says anything new.

Until now.

“You’re dead, Eds,” Richie croaks, and then instantly regrets it. His hands are shaking on the steering wheel. The steering wheel -- the thought clicks in, and Richie’s chest tightens. It’s a dream, isn’t it?

“Hey, I’ll get you home,” Richie says quickly, fumbling for the keys in the ignition, trying to parse where exactly the fuck they are. It’s no street he’s ever seen -- no street at all, really, just sky and road all grey and the same stretched out in front of him. “I’ll drive wherever the fuck you want me to go, buddy, we going to New York? You want --”

“Richie,” He knows it’s a dream by the softness in Eddie’s voice. Richie’s face feels cold, as if Eddie reached out and put a hand there, although he hasn’t. He sits in the passenger seat, and he looks sad, sad, sad, bleeding out onto the leather seat.

Richie wakes up sobbing. 

\--

He has to go back to Derry.

The idea festers in the back of his mind, lingering and pressing the more he ignores it. Even thinking about going back to that hell hole means that he’s finally cracked, probably, and the worst part is knowing that he’s got no one to convince him out of it. The others would take it as a rallying call, he knows, which is exactly why he can’t breathe a word of it to anyone.

They all deserve a little peace, after what they’ve been through. Maybe Richie does, too, but he certainly isn’t getting it here, living the fucking Sixth Sense day in and day out while his career waves at him through the rearview mirror.

He spends two days pacing around his apartment, trying to talk himself out of the whole thing. He doesn’t even know what he’ll do when he gets there -- Mike had a plan, and a goal, and Richie has no such thing. Richie doesn’t even have a fucking clown to lay a bat into, when it comes down to it. 

Still, he packs his bags and he reserves a flight. Whatever this is, the core of it is in Derry, with Eddie.

\--

There’s a weather warning when he gets to the airport, and for the first hour, it looks like the flight will be grounded. In the end, it goes up though, and Richie stares nervously out his window at the thick, heavy clouds that surround them. 

It feels fitting, feels exactly how going back to Derry should be. He pops a xanax and tries to ignore how his hand shakes around his little plastic cup of gingerale.

Halfway through the flight, his phone lights up:

**Stan:** _Are you doing something stupid right now?_

Richie stares at it for a second, running his tongue across the back of his teeth, stomach twisting. 

**Richie:** _???_

**Stan:** _So yes? I saw your tour got cancelled._

**Richie:** _that was like a week ago._

**Stan:** _Well I didn’t get a fucked up feeling about you until an hour ago, sue me. I figured you were just screwing up in a normal way before. What are you doing?_

**Richie:** _you have feelings about me? ;)_

**Richie: ...** _i’m not sure yet. i’ll let you know when i figure it out?_

**Stan:** _K. If I don’t hear from you in a couple days, I’m calling Bill. Don’t slit your wrists Tozier, the recovery time isn’t worth it. Take it from someone who knows._

**Richie:** _love you too stanny <3333 _

He sleeps through the rest of the flight, and he dreams about nothing. It’s stupid to think it, but when he wakes up in Maine, he wants to thank Stan for that.

\--

As much as he knows he has to be in Derry to get to the bottom of this shit, Richie still can’t bring himself to book a room at the Townhouse. It still feels too raw, and he’s already seeing Eddie everywhere he goes -- he doesn’t need to replay the shit that actually happened.

There’s a motel by the highway that puts him about fifteen minutes away, if he’s driving. He picks the rental car up when he gets off the flight and makes the trip, and the first thing he thinks is that Eddie would _hate_ this place. There are water stains on the ceiling, and nasty shag carpeting that looks like it hasn’t been changed in at least a decade. The girl running the desk could be 28 or 38, with badly dyed hair and a lip piercing that looks like a home job if the scarring around it is any indication. 

When she finally looks up from her Christopher Pike book to slide Richie his room key, there’s a surprised recognition in her eyes.

“Hey,” she says, raising her eyebrows at him as Richie takes the key. “You’re that comedian, right? I thought you were supposed to be in rehab.”

So that’s great.

The bedding on the double bed is ugly and overly starched, but when Richie leans over and presses his nose to it, it does smell clean. He briefly considers googling how to check for bedbugs, and then quickly discards the idea as over the top.

You know who _would_ check...

“Beep beep, asshole,” Richie mutters to himself, carelessly tossing his suitcase onto the bed.

Despite the nap on the plane and the anxiety thrumming through his veins, he still feels dead tired. He takes a shower in water that never quite gets hot enough to try and scrub the airport grime off of his skin. Halfway through he realizes he forgot his own shampoo, and settles for washing his hair with the tiny bar of prepackaged soap provided for him.

The sheets are itchy when he collapses into them, and too cool on his damp skin. Still, he drifts off listening to the sound of the highway outside the window.

\--

“Richie --”

Steering wheel, grey sky, leather seats.

_Fuck this_ , Richie thinks. _Fuck this, fuck this, fuck this._ He takes his hands off the wheel and squeezes his eyes shut, trying to think of something else instead, some other version of Eddie he can conjure up instead of this one, begging for something that Richie’s never able to give him -- Eddie in the Orient, Eddie in the townhouse, Eddie smiling at him in the woods while they searched for the clubhouse, anything --

He opens his eyes to the Barrens. Above him, the sky is thick with black clouds, and water rushes around his feet below him, soaking through his shoes and his socks.

“Grey water,” Eddie shudders at his shoulder, and Richie only gets a glance of him before he’s gone again. Up ahead, the sewer tunnel gapes impossibly wide and dark.

“This isn’t any better,” Richie says, to no one in particular, his voice echoing off the rocks around him. Steeling himself, he starts to trudge towards the tunnel, unable to help feeling like he’s walkinmg into the mouth of some beast.

Which isn’t a bad comparison, all things considered.

“Eddie?” he calls out, his voice echoing back on him. “Hey Eds!”

No answer. It feels like he’s been walking through the tunnel for entirely too long, and he still has a ways to go. Frowning, Richie realizes the water has gotten deeper -- it’s at his calves, now, and rushing heavily past him. He has to work against the current to make any headway.

“Shit,” he mutters, shaking cold water off his hands. “Eds! Hey, where are you, man?”

The further he goes, the narrower the tunnel becomes: closing in tighter and tighter, and the water rises with it. Even as it climbs to his chest, he continues forward, drawn in like he’s pulled by a thread. 

“Richie,” he hears, mournful and miserable, like a lament.

“Eddie!” he risks a mouthful of water as he shouts. “Where are you? I’ll find you! I came back for you!” 

Water splashes back, smears damply against his glasses, and Richie chokes in his effort to stay afloat. His head nearly hits the top of the tightening tunnel, and Eddie’s voice is clear as a bell. 

“I came back for you too.” 

Water rushes up like a tide: throwing him back and spitting him out, and Richie wakes up in bed: drenched with sweat instead of sewage. 

\--

In retrospect, subbing the soap for shampoo was one of his worse ideas. His hair is an honest to god rat’s nest the next morning, and Richie finds himself having to actually untangle the mess of it with his fingers, which is a first. It’s a bad start to the day, made worse by the fact that the dinky little coffeemaker in his room doesn’t do anything other than make an awful grinding noise when he tries to use it.

“Fucking _Derry_ ,” Richie curses, because clown or not, the place is obviously cursed and obviously leaking through to the surrounding area.

He gets into town around noon, antsy and still entirely unsure what he’s supposed to be doing here. His dream from the night before still clings to his shoulders, which either means that the Barrens should be the first place he goes, or somewhere he should avoid completely. 

He decides to risk it, because the only other place he can think of going still makes his stomach hurt to think about. 

The rocks are slick and cold when he makes it to the edge of the water -- black but not frozen despite the cold. He wishes, suddenly and strongly, that he had the others with him. It feels wrong to be back here by himself, even if he knows it’s for the best, and he swallows around the knot it leaves in his throat.

Still, as he looks out over the water he can tell that something here has changed. The dread that he feels here is something that belongs to him, instead of something inherent to the waters themselves. The place feels like a graveyard instead of a killing ground, and as Richie shivers on the shore, he feels no sign of Eddie Kaspbrak. 

Is that what he’s waiting for? Is that why he’s here? It feels so stupid and juvenile, and Richie rubs his hands over his eyes. If he wanted closure he should have just gone back to Neibolt, but he wasn’t even brave enough to do that. Stupid. Stupid, and cowardly, and very probably fucking insane, at this point. 

Was he expecting Eddie to be here waiting for him? To step out of the tunnel all smiling and whole? Love wasn’t enough to bring Georgie back, or Betty Ripsom, or Adrian Mellon, or anyone else whose bodies washed up here, or were lost in the tunnels. Love didn’t save Eddie when he was bleeding out under Richie’s hands.

Richie loved him, and even if he’d told him, it wouldn’t have been enough.

Hunching his shoulders against the cold wind that’s started to pick up, Richie turns to leave when something catches his eye. There’s a shimmer just under the water, picking up the tiny sliver of sunlight peeking through the trees. Leaning forward, Richie dips his hand into the icy creek and closes his fingers around it, shivering as he brings it into view.

A token from the Capitol Theatre.

\--

Something is fucking with him. It isn’t the clown, Richie is pretty sure -- for one, he can still remember everything, and the feeling he’s getting being back here now is nothing compared to the overwhelming, bone deep fear he had felt when they were dealing with It before. 

Besides, he watched the fucking thing die, he’s sure of that. 

So it isn’t the clown, but it’s something that knows him, he thinks, as he grips his hand around the little gold coin until he feels it bite into his palm. Something that wanted him back in Derry, and is willing to use Eddie against him to accomplish that, right?

The thought is almost comforting, in a fucked up kind of way. It gives him an excuse to turn the gnawing, miserable grief he’s been carrying around into anger instead, which seems a lot easier to deal with. He can be angry that Eddie’s been turned into some kind of feverish hallucination. 

  
  


\--

Richie wakes up shivering. 

Moonlight filters through the cheap plastic blinds covering the window across the room, muddling in with the yellowish streetlamp illuminating the parking lot outside and casting just enough light around the room that Richie can barely make out the edges of his surroundings. Barely. Without his glasses on, it’s all smudgy, and he shifts in bed, shuddering as he realizes the cause of his chill:

The sheets at the end of the bed are damp, clinging to his feet.

“Shit,” Richie mumbles hoarsely, thumping his head back against the flat pillow beneath it. It’s been raining on and off all night; there must be a fucking leak in the cheap-ass ceiling. With an incoherent noise of frustration, he rolls over, fumbling blindly at the bedside table for his glasses. As he does, his feet shift, bumping against something cold and solid at the end of the bed.

Not something -- someone. There’s someone sitting at the end of Richie’s bed.

An embarrassing, strangled yelp falls past his lips, and Richie scrambles to the head of the bed. His hand slams clumsily around the bedside table, knocking over the alarm clock before his fingers finally close around the frames of his glasses and bring them to his face.

Sitting at the foot of the bed is Eddie, drip, drip, dripping on the sheets.

“Hey Rich,” he says.

In the half-dark motel room, it’s hard to make out any details about him. He’s wearing the same clothes as when Richie last saw him, but they’re soaked completely through. His hair is wet, too, sticking to his forehead instead of sitting so neatly the way he usually has it. He’s only half-facing Richie, his hands rested in his own lap.

He seems... too still. That tense, tightly wound energy he always carried with him is absent, and the lack is off putting.

It’s definitely Eddie, though. Now that he’s remembered him, Richie thinks he would know him anywhere.

“Am I dreaming again?” Richie croaks, trembling at the other end of the bed. He screws his eyes shut tightly, willing the vision in front of him to change. When he opens his eyes, Eddie is still there. The shadows cast across his face make his eyes look hollow.

“You’ve been dreaming about me?” Eddie says, and Richie’s not nearly put together enough to try and decipher his tone.

“Eds, you’re supposed to be --”

“Dead,” Eddie finishes. A smile flickers across his lips, or maybe it’s just a trick of the light. His voice is odd, Richie thinks. Too low, deep like he just woke up. “Yeah. I’m pretty dead, man. Trust me.”

RIchie’s chest feels tight, and his throat hurts. He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and then another, and then another... he might be hyperventilating, actually, or halfway to crying. Everything about him _hurts._

“I think I’m having a fucking heart attack,” he says, his voice cracking somewhere in the middle of the sentence. 

Eddie scoffs, and for the first time he actually sounds like himself.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” he scolds. “If I got you out of the deadlights just for you to croak now, I’ll fucking kick your ass in the afterlife, Richie. Jesus Christ.”

Now Richie really is crying -- fat, salty tears rolling down his cheeks, a laugh that turns into a sob before it even leaves his throat. He’s not dreaming. If this is a hallucination it’s the longest one he’s had yet, and it doesn’t seem to be going away. Which means Eddie is here, sitting in his bed. Dead.

“You look fucking awful,” Richie manages between sobs. He thinks there’s probably snot running down his face; and suddenly he realizes that he can’t tell if Eddie is appropriately disgusted by that in the dark. Impulsively he reaches over to the sidelight and turns it on. 

Eddie does look awful. It looks like he’s tried to wipe the blood away from his mouth, but there’s still traces of it down his neck and crusted around his jaw. The circles under his eyes are purple up close, and without the dark to hide it his skin is entirely the wrong color. 

“I should look worse,” Eddie offers, as if Richie is supposed to take it as consolation. “Considering how long I’ve been under there. Stop crying.”

He doesn’t seem nearly discomfited enough by the situation; aside from the barest touch of annoyance in his voice, Richie can’t read him at all. He doesn’t squirm at the mud and water that cakes to him, doesn’t seem to see the wreck Richie is making of his own face. Then again, what diseases does Eddie have to worry about now? What’s a germaphobe in a perma-state of sickness?

“How did you get here?” Richie asks hoarsely, obediently trying to wipe tears away from his own face. “How did you get -- how did you get out? How long have you been walking around like that?”

Eddie opens his mouth to reply, and for a split second Richie has the vision of him coughing up sludge again. Instead he just frowns, apparently lost for words.

“I walked here,” he answers belatedly. “From the Barrens. I -- knew you would be here.”

“You _walked_?”

“It’s not like I got tired,” Eddie snaps, in a voice that doesn’t sound snappish at all. It doesn’t seem like he’s moved at all since he appeared at Richie’s feet. “I kept seeing you, and then I knew you would be here, so I walked.”

Richie doesn’t have the headspace to unpack all of that right now. He rubs the heels of his palms over his eyesockets to try and keep himself from losing it again, and tries to prioritize.

Eddie is dead. That’s a big one, but he can’t do anything about it right this very second. Eddie knew how to find him, somehow, and he’s not sure _what_ to make of that, but it probably has to sit low on the list for the time being. 

Eddie is also disgusting, and the middle of his chest seems to be sticking to the fabric of his shirt in a coagulated mess. He stinks like he’s been underground for a year, and he’s still soaking wet, and even if he can’t feel the cold, Richie is getting a chill just looking at him.

“Okay, we’re gonna start small,” Richie decides abruptly. “You need to shower, and then we’re gonna play doctor. That thing on your chest is freaking me the fuck out.”

“I think it’s a little late to do anything about it,” Eddie replies.

“ _You’re_ a little late,” Richie retorts on instinct, and then snorts. If he can’t laugh, what the fuck is he supposed to do. “I’m wrapping it up so at least you won’t get your juices all over a clean shirt.”

\--

With Eddie hidden away behind the shower curtain, swallowed up by the sound of running water, Richie stares at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and wills himself not to throw up.

He’s gone crazy. He lost his best friend. Had a mental breakdown. And now he’s gone crazy. That’s the explanation right? That’s the only feasible way to account for Eddie: pale and cold and not entirely himself. 

“Get it together, buddy,” he tells his reflection. As if after a stern talking to, Eddie will disappear and his shower will be mysteriously empty except for running water. 

He doesn’t. The water turns off and when the curtain pulls back at the top corner: Eddie is there. Richie can’t decide if he looks better or worse with the grime washed away from his face -- he looks cleaner, but it also makes it glaringly obvious how sickly his complexion is. 

The fluorescent lighting doesn’t do him any favours either, but Richie still can’t help but stare. He’s got the urge to reach out and touch his face, to trace the beautiful line of Eddie’s jaw with his thumb, as if he could warm him back up that way. His eyelashes look extra dark against translucent pallor of his skin, and it hits Richie like a miserable punch to the gut that he _loves_ him, still.

Priorities, Tozier.

“Do you have my stuff?” Eddie asks, still hidden behind the shower curtain. He either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care that Richie is gawking at him -- a year ago, Richie would have said the former, but he’s quickly figuring out that the Eddie who walked out of Neibolt isn’t the same one who walked in, so it’s a toss up.

“What?” Richie says stupidly, then catching up -- “What stuff?”

“From the inn. My bags.”

“Yeah,” Richie replies on impulse -- it’s true, he took Eddie’s stuff with him when he left Derry because someone had to. They didn’t have anywhere to send it back to, and leaving it would have meant letting it be thrown away, so Richie had loaded all three ridiculous bags up with him.

Really, it was the only thing he’d had of Eddie’s to take home.

In the shower, Eddie stares at him, seemingly waiting, and Richie blinks. “Wait, not like -- not _here._ Why would I have your bags here? Eds, it’s been like a year, that stuff’s collecting dust in my closet.”

Eddie seems to waver uncertainly, a confused expression flitting across his face, and Richie rushes to fix it:

“I’ll grab you some clothes, hang on.”

He quickly ducks out of the bathroom to retrieve some things from his own suitcase, not entirely trusting Eddie alone at this point. He adds “no concept of time” to the mental list of things they need to address. When he comes back, Eddie is in the exact same position as when he left him, staring out at nothing from behind the tub, and Richie nearly jumps.

“God that’s fucking creepy,” he mutters, setting the pile of clothes down on the sink. “Here. Uh -- everything’s going to be too big on your tiny, pint-sized body but it’ll do for now. Don’t put the shirt on yet, I still have to wrap you up, but --”

“Okay,” Eddie says, and starts to step out of the shower.

Richie flushes red, and quickly turns back towards the door. 

“I know you’re -- ” Richie trails off, unable to quite bring himself to say it. “Fucked up, because you aren’t even mad that I’m calling you a hobbit. Are you sure you’re Eddie Kaspbrak? How am I supposed to trust you aren’t some... weird impostor.”

“What does your gut tell you?”

Richie frowns; it isn’t a real answer, but the implication hits. He knows Eddie. He knows, at the core of him, that this is Eddie, whole or not. 

“Are you going to bandage me, or should I do it myself?” Eddie asks, apparently unbothered by the lack of response. When Richie turns, he’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub, clothed from the waist down and watching him expectantly.

“Jesus fuck,” Richie curses, instinctively looking up towards the ceiling almost as soon as he glances at him in an attempt not to be sick. Eddie’s torso is more meat than person, gaping dark red and sticky with cold blood. WIthout his shirt to cover it, the nasty, ragged edges of the skin are obvious..

“Shit,” Richie says. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“Don’t start crying again, asshole,” Eddie warns. “Did you always cry this much? There should be a first aid kit under the sink.”

Heaving a shuddering breath, Richie tries to collect himself. It’s like a movie, he forces himself to think. It’s all corn syrup and latex, and not at all Eddie’s actual organs peeking out at him through bloodied ribs. This is _American Werewolf in London,_ and Richie is Rick Baker. It’s fine.

He finds the first aid kit exactly where Eddie instructed, and takes it out, frowning as he unfurls a roll of gauze. It might just barely be enough, if he’s careful with it. Setting the kit on the closed toilet seat, Richie kneels in front of where Eddie sits. 

“Do you have like, magic brain powers now?” Richie asks, reverting back to the comfortable habit of running his mouth to keep himself distracted. “Is that how you knew where the bandages and shit would be?”

“Most places have a first aid kit,” Eddie replies, sitting statue-still while Richie presses little squares of sterile gauze along the edge of the hole in his chest. “Even shit hole places like this. I travel a lot for work.”

Eddie’s skin is cold under Richie’s fingers. It should be expected, but it still rings at the forefront of his mind. He’s forgone the usual step of sterilizing the wound, working instead to try and at least cover most of it with what little materials he has before wrapping him up. 

He’s never touched Eddie like this, never put his hands on his skin with the kind of care he uses now. His hands are shaking, and he can’t tell if Eddie notices. Can’t tell if Eddie can even feel him, really. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
